Shades of Gray

“Two Lovers,” James Gray’s romantic melodrama, set in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Vinessa Shaw, opens today in theatres. (It’s also available on video-on-demand.) For now, let’s just thank Steve Erickson at SpoutBlog for this superb, revealing interview with Gray.

You might not buy this, but I never conceived of my first three films as genre films. They were very personal…I thought about it as an autobiographical form of expression. It seems weird, as if my life was like a ‘70s gangster film, but it’s true.

P.S. Gray is yet another American artist whose following is greater in France than here (and he addresses the matter in the interview with Erickson). The movie opened in Paris in November to rave reviews; in Libération, it was called “a dark and lyrical masterpiece.”